Forms Flashcards
On The Death of a Fair Infant
Rhyme Royal (hybrid form: The seven-line stanzas meld Chaucerian rime royal with the Spenserian stanza, retaining the Spenserian final alexandrine as well as Spenserian archaisms and schemes of alliteration and assonance)
L’Allegro
Lyric poem in Rhyming couplets
Il Penseroso
Lyric poem in Rhyming couplets
On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity-4 first stanzas
The first four stanzas make up the proem. Each of these stanzas consists of six lines of iambic pentameter, which conclude in an alexandrine. This echoes Chaucerian and Spenserian tradition, and also imitates the form practiced in Milton’s earlier poem “On the Death of Fair Infant Dying of a Cough.”
On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity-The Hymn
The second half of the poem, in which Milton creates his own form, has been alternately called the “hymn” and the “ode.” In this section, the eight lines of each stanza vary in length (6, 6, 19, 6, 6, 10, 8, 12), each terminating in an alexandrine
Epitathium damonis
Pastoral elegy
On Shakespear
“On Shakespeare” is a sixteen-line epitaph written in iambic pentameter and divided into heroic couplets, an unusual meter for John Milton’s poetry
Lycidas
Pastoral elegy, alternating iambic pentameter and trimeter (mostly)
The Passion
Rhyme Royal
